Finding a way to work it out

Amid anger statewide over new standards, a small district sees some success

PAUL BUCKOWSKIWatervliet Elementary School fourth grade teacher Kelly Webster, right, works with a group of students during a reading exercise Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2013, in Watervliet, N.Y. The students worked in small groups taking turns reading an article aloud. They would discuss what they read with group members. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

PAUL BUCKOWSKIWatervliet Elementary School fourth grade teacher Jeanne Lance works with a student as they read through an article Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2013, at Watervliet Elementary School in Watervliet, N.Y. Lance had the students pair up to read through the article. Each group would present what they learned from their reading to the group. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

PAUL BUCKOWSKIWatervliet Elementary School fourth grade teacher Khalan Heid looks for input from students as they work through a math problem Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2013, in Watervliet, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

PAUL BUCKOWSKIWatervliet Elementary School fourth grade students in Khalan Heid's class work in groups as they discuss how to solve a math problem Wednesday morning, Dec. 11, 2013, in Watervliet, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

PAUL BUCKOWSKITwo fourth grade Watervliet Elementary School students in Jeanne Lance's class work together on reading and discussing an article Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2013 in Watervliet, N.Y. Lance had the students work in small groups. They studied an article and presented their findings to fellow students. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)

Watervliet

Kelly Webster's fourth-grade class was seated in a lopsided circle, engrossed in debating the finer points of close reading.

One mop-haired boy raised his hand to offer up a how-to on the newly learned skill: "Somebody reads it first, then you read it with a partner and circle words you don't understand," he explained.

"You can use a question mark, too," added a female classmate, as Webster scrawled their commentary on a white board.

These days, Webster said, her nine and 10-year-olds at Watervliet Elementary School scramble for highlighters with which to mark up pretty much every text or sheet of paper they're given. It's one of the most visible demonstrations of the state's new learning standards in her classroom.

"It's not subtle," said Principal Theresa O'Brien. "There's a whole new change this year. These students are deeply engaged."

Since 2010, New York, like many states, has been entrenched in transition to the new set of national learning standards known as the Common Core. This fall marked the first school year those standards have been fully in place in New York.

In the Watervliet City School District, a 1,500 student district in a largely poor and working-class sliver of Albany County, teachers and administrators have already begun to notice a marked change in the classroom.

"The best part is how independent they are," said Webster, 32.

Her job has shifted, in some ways, from teacher to facilitator.

On a recent weekday, embarking upon the aforementioned close reading of a text about snakes in the American Southwest, Webster asked her students to discuss what the word "ecosystem" might mean.

They gathered in groups of three — what the teachers call "turn and talk" —attempting to discern its meaning based on context from a sentence. Students chattered quietly, mostly ignorant of distractions from their work such as the principal, a journalist and photographer in the room.

In the past, explained, Webster, the class would have read through a text once as a group and then discussed it briefly. Instead, now, students also re-read in pairs and fill out worksheets that test their understanding of textual themes, facts and vocabulary.

Watervliet's fourth-graders, said Jeanne Lance, another fourth-grade teacher at the school, are already noticeably deeper thinkers.

Most teachers in Watervliet, said Superintendent Lori Caplan, have "embraced" the Common Core.

Parents have reacted with ire to the new curriculum, along with testing, student privacy and a host of other education issues, most notably in vehement droves at several forums state Education Commissioner John King has held throughout the state. That anger was particularly stoked when the scores of state tests fell dramatically, after new, more challenging tests based on the new standards were issued last school year.

Watervliet educators, though, are not unusual among their peers in their embrace of the new criterion.

In an interview with the Times Union earlier this month, members of the New York State Educational Conference Board, a diverse consortium of major statewide educational organizations, explained that though the "standard is not necessarily perfect, we do agree on the higher standard."

A National Education Association survey that questioned 1,200 educators across the nation last July found that more that three quarters of those educators either completely favored the new standards or supported them with "some reservations."

"We need to get a kind of reality check about Common Core," said North Colonie School Superintendent D. Joseph Corr, who has also seen positive changes from the standards in his own district's classrooms. "Common Core in and of itself is valuable."

Before the Common Core, each state had its own guidelines. The new standards, adopted thus far by 45 states, establishes nationwide goals for learning in reading and math in kindergarten through high school.

The central philosophy of those new standards is that by delving deeper into more basic concepts — moving beyond mere memorization of countless words and formulas — students will grasp foundational ideas with more thorough understanding.

In the fourth grade, for example, focus is on only three areas of math. Students learn fluency with multi-digit multiplication and an understanding of multi-digit division, gain a basic understanding of fractions and an comprehension of how to analyze and classify geometric figures.

The emphasis is much more on the conceptual: Understanding that a multiplication equation is also a comparison showing that, for example, in the equation 7 x 5 = 35, 35 is 5 times as many as 7 and 7 times as many as 5.

In Khalan Heid's fourth-grade class at Watervliet, students were asked to solve a word problem in which a school principal wanted to buy eight pencils for each of the school's 859 students. They were encouraged to model the problem visually using boxes.

When one student explained that he had just added to get the answer, the apparent class know-it-all shot him down for solving the problem incorrectly.

"Maybe he did add it," responded Heid. "Multiplication is repetition."

On another problem, Heid encouraged students to find the answer in multiple ways, finding the method they liked best.

"It's about being very articulate with those foundational skills, so that when they see something more difficult, they can just build on what they already know," explained O'Brien, the principal.

In Tami Karbowski's seventh-grade English class at the district's secondary school, she noted that she is already seeing her students become better readers and writers.

Usually at this point in the year, she said, they would have completed at least three novels. This year, they are still making their way through their first novel, "A Long Walk to Water," a contemporary fiction about a young Sudanese girl and boy.

In class, Karbowski taught students about juxtaposition, a theme of the book, by examining juxtaposed images of a Jenny Craig store and a sweets shop, comparing and contrasting the images to try and understand the artist's purpose in placing them next to one another.

"They are really taking ownership of their own ideas," said Karbowski.

That is not to say there have not been hiccups.

The state sought to prepare teachers for the new standards by holding workshops and building a website, Engage NY, that hosts videos and written outlines of the expected changes, as well as curriculum "modules" intended as guides for teachers to develop their own lesson plans in line with the new standards.

Watervliet echoes the concerns of many other districts and education organization in criticism of the state's implementation of the new standards.

For one there was the cost: Watervliet, an economically strapped district with a total budget of $23.5 million for the 2013-14 school year, spent about $375,000 on new materials and teacher development to align their existing curriculum with the Common Core.

Learning so much new material was time consuming as well as mentally taxing for the teachers, forcing them to spend hours reading through modules running hundreds of pages long and band together to develop new lessons surrounding them.

"There were a lot of late night phone calls to each other," said Webster, the fourth grade teacher.

"And texting," added Lance, her colleague.

Several teachers in the district noted that there had not been sufficient time between when the modules were posted and the beginning of the school year; the state still has not posted all modules for all grade levels.

Jhael Dragon, who teaches high school algebra I, noted that with older students, it generally seemed like too much, too soon — her kids are struggling trying to learn an entirely new way to think about math while also learning new material.

"It's a whole new style of learning," she said. "I personally like it, but these kids just aren't ready for it."

Still, she noted, the approach has helped certain concepts click for some students. For example, she has tried using things like visualizations of equations and YouTube videos to supplement more straight forward algebraic equations.